Elizabeth Jo

Because after all, if we're going to go back to the founding, the founders were perfectly comfortable restricting the right to vote to themselves and nobody else.

So that's kind of a question left up in the air.

Right.

So maybe the Republican form of government guarantee is a little bit meaningless in the sense that it doesn't provide strong protections against attacks on voting rights.

And maybe the threat of having a totalitarian state government is pretty remote, maybe.

But, you know, it's a pretty broad set of outlines about what is a guarantee of a Republican form of government.

And then there is the protection clause of Article 4.

The federal government shall protect each of them, the states, against invasion.

So this is pretty interesting because this part of Article 4 requires, that's the shall, right?

Requires the federal government to protect each state from invasion and from domestic violence if the state asks for it.

So the protection clause actually works together with another part of the Constitution, which is found in Article 1.

That's the invasion clause.

In the invasion clause of Article 1, the states are not actually allowed to act in their own defense unless there's like a real emergency, unless they are, as the Constitution says, actually invaded.

So the Constitution sets up a scheme where the federal government is actually the one responsible for the collective security of the states.

So this is the part where you're really supposed to ask the federal government for help or the federal government is supposed to help you, the states.

Not a commonly used doctrine, unless you are Texas.

So I don't know if you remember in 2023, Texas thought it would be a good idea to install a 1000 feet system of buoys.

along the rio grande river these were do you not recall that at all yeah well this happened this was a giant buoy line they were connected by heavy chains and the buoys themselves were like four feet across so so large that you couldn't kind of climb over them and essentially this is to prevent people from crossing into the united states right by swimming across the river um

It's mostly symbolic because I said it was 1,000 feet, right?

And the Texas-Mexico border is like 1,200 miles or something like that.